Archival research is akin to poking through someone’s bedroom while they are gone, or reading someone’s diary without their permission. At first, it seems that you are violating the space of another individual. There is no way for them to specifically grant you access, nor for them to even know that you are reading…

“Revealing Her Story: Documenting African American Women Intellectuals” is a two-year project funded by the National Historical Publications and Records Commission to arrange and describe the personal papers of nine African American women writers, artists and musicians. Collections included in the project are the Pearl Cleage papers; additions to the Delilah Jackson papers; the Samella…

Rare scrapbooks that document African American life in the United States from 1890-1975 are being preserved with support through a “Save America’s Treasures” (SAT) grant. The project is a collaborative effort with Emory University Preservation Office, Digital Curation Center, and the Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library (MARBL). The SAT grant is awarded through the…

“Revealing Her Story: Documenting African American Women Intellectuals” is a two-year project funded by the National Historical Publications and Records Commission to arrange and describe the personal papers of nine African American women writers, artists and musicians. Collections included in the project are the Pearl Cleage papers; additions to the Delilah Jackson papers; the Samella…

August 29, 2013 was a fun, if slightly overwhelming, day of work on the exhibit “Seamus Heaney: The Music of What Happens.” The curatorial team sat in MARBL for hours going through hundreds of Heaney’s photos as we tried to whittle down our selections to a few dozen. Some of the decisions were easy—several of…

We are pleased to announce that the processing of the Samella S. Lewis papers is now complete. Samella Lewis is an artist, educator, filmmaker and author from New Orleans. She attended Dillard University, Hampton University and Ohio State University and has taught at many American universities. She is the founder of the International Review of…

In 1990, on the occasion of playwright Rebecca Ranson‘s forty-seventh birthday, the writer and poet delivered a public performance in Atlanta while in character as her alter ego, Brownie Broadway. The dialogue, performed with call-and-response audience participation, recounted the most important experiences in the playwright’s life, including her pregnancy at age seventeen, her first marriage…

“Revealing Her Story: Documenting African American Women Intellectuals” is a two-year project funded by the National Historical Publications and Records Commission to arrange and describe the personal papers of nine African American women writers, artists and musicians. Collections included in the project are the Pearl Cleage papers; additions to the Delilah Jackson papers; the Samella…

MARBL is pairing with Southern Spaces, a peer-reviewed, multimedia, open-access journal published in collaboration with the Robert W. Woodruff Library of Emory University, to publish short features on MARBL collections, events, and exhibits that tell the history of spaces and places in the US South. These posts investigate the geographical, historical, and cultural study of real…

“Revealing Her Story: Documenting African American Women Intellectuals” is a two-year project funded by the National Historical Publications and Records Commission to arrange and describe the personal papers of nine African American women writers, artists and musicians. Collections included in the project are the Pearl Cleage papers; additions to the Delilah Jackson papers; the Samella…